20 VIRTUOSI Your programme brings together works ranging from the Baroque to contemporary music, by way of Romanticism, jazz and folk music. Did you conceive an underlying thread, a specific ambience running right through the album? Thomas Leleu: The intimate nature of the duo and the choice of pieces are underpinned by a recorded sound that emphasises proximity and fusion of timbres. We imagined this very special atmosphere as the hallmark of the album. Romain Leleu: The arrangements we made or commissioned were guided by experiments with timbre, phrasing and articulation. We started with the Bach pieces and the Handel-Halvorsen Passacaglia, which we see as the central piece in the programme. The Passacaglia is a large-scale structure built on a series of variations. Manuel Doutrelant’s transcription made no alterations to the score. Nevertheless, it wasn’t our intention to imitate the original version, but to appropriate it for ourselves and offer a new take on it. There’s another dimension that is clearly perceptible in your album. It lies in a cantabile style that is, to say the least, quite novel. One can hear this both in the trumpet part, whose colours evoke the sound of Bach’s cantatas and oratorios, and in the unprecedented vocality of the ‘a cappella’ pieces for tuba, particularly in the Improvisation no.3 and the Étude by Piazzolla that follows it. Romain Leleu: I’ve always thought of the trumpet as an instrument that’s close to the human voice. The phrasing of the tuba, as played by Thomas, is equally vocal. Another difficulty that crops up here is the need to maintain a cantabile musical line that is spontaneous while still respecting the harmony of the original scores.
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